Thoughts on Morality and Culture

Abstract

Our topic asks for a/the “normative outlook” on “the cultural edifice of the moral mind.” In this essay, I shall attempt to fix a fairly definite meaning for each of these notions, and then argue that our normative outlook insofar as this cultural edifice is moral is very strong approval. By the (or a) “cultural edifice,” I take it, we mean pretty much the whole of society insofar as it is a product of human effort, which in turn is affected, no doubt, by luck – good and bad – and shot through, informed, and constrained by the moralities of the various societies that make it up. But in order to talk coherently of “the moral mind,” we need a clear and strong moral theory, one that presents a basic set of moral principles or ideas, ones which ought, therefore, to impose a coherent shape on the whole. This is vague, to be sure, and will be thought in a basic way to be implausible. I shall try at least briefly to affirm the idea and to insist that it is not after all so implausible. Is there, then, a supreme, overriding morality? Yes, I claim (in the wake, to be sure, of many others, including Aristotle, Kant, David Gauthier, and Nicholas Rescher). It has one supreme idea that nobody is to make their way in the world by imposing costs on other innocent people. (That formulation is a generalization of the ideas of Kant, Hobbes, Socrates, and perhaps that of mankind generally.) The cultural world as we know it includes the accomplishments of the original and the brilliant, plus even more the communal and cooperative efforts of innumerable people, including symphony orchestras and art museums on and on, down to a gathering of friends playing cricket. On the other hand, of course, it contains much violence and evil. What our world would look like in the absence of that evil is very hard to say – but, surely, it would be better.